During my internship that I completed as part of my studies at Faculty of Social Work in Ljubljana, I learned about foster care. I had the opportunity to work with a foster family where the foster mother was the child’s relative. Like any other family, this one also faced various challenges. When working with the family, I often thought about the impact of family ties on what was going on in the family. I wondered what challenges foster mothers, who are not the child’s relatives, face. This sparked the interest and curiosity about the differences in implementation of kinship and non-kinship foster care. In my dissertation, I am researching the course of the child’s arrival in foster care, the feelings that foster mothers faced at the beginning of foster care, family relationships, the challenges foster parents face while their foster child is growing up, relations between foster parents and a child’s biological family and, finally, the help and support needed by foster carers to carry out foster care activities. The theoretical part covers the topics of foster care and family, growing up in a foster family, social work with a foster family, and the topic of kinship and non-kinship foster families. In the empirical part, I present the methodology of the conducted research. I then present the results obtained with a focus group and a partially standardized interview. A total of seven foster mothers participated in both methods, three of which are the child’s relatives and four who are not. The results showed that foster mothers who provide kinship foster care are older than those who provide non-kinship foster care. The kinship affects the relationships in the foster family itself, as well as the relationship between the foster family and the child’s biological family. It turned out that children as well as foster mothers face many challenges. There are, however, no significant differences in the challenges faced between related and unrelated foster families. Finally, the results showed that foster mothers still have many needs that are unmet by the current foster care system.
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